1 Thessalonians 5:12-15 Growing in Community

Of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak takes us through his series, Hope Rising, from the Book of First Thessalonians. Let's listen in.

Growing in Community and the Call to Church Maturity

Well, good morning, Recast Church.

Good morning, everybody.

I'm Don Filsak, I'm the lead pastor here, and I'd like to start off our time together by welcoming you all here to this gathering of God's people here in Matawan, Michigan at Recast Church. The beautiful thing is that we're a variety of people coming from a variety of settings, a bunch of different experiences that you've had this week, a variety of backgrounds that you've had throughout your life, but we gather together for what is one common purpose.

I hope it's a part of the reason that you're here, and that is to grow together, to grow together. I hope that that's part of the reason that you are sitting in a seat right now, listening to me, is that we would all desire to gather together and grow.

At Recast Church, we define maturity a little bit different. I think that a lot of times we think of maturity as a line that is crossed, a place that you arrive, and now I am mature, and you get to sit back and relax and rest in your maturity.

We like to define maturity as a commitment to an ongoing process of growth in your life, that regardless of how old you are, how many years you've walked with Christ, or how few years you've walked with Christ, or whether you're even just here learning things for the first time and checking things out, that there is growth to be had in all of us, and we believe that that process is defined by three simple things, growing in faith.

I say simple to communicate, but not necessarily simple to do, but growing in faith, growing in community, and growing in service, and we believe that in order to be who God wants us to be as parts of the church, we need to have our feet set on a journey that is a process of lifelong growth in trusting God that is growing in faith, in living together that is growing in community, and in serving one another using the gifts and abilities that God has given us to serve others outside of ourselves, and particularly within the church.

And the start of all of that journey is simply to kind of explain that here at the start of this service, is trust in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for each one of us on the cross, where he bore our sins away.

He took away the affront that we had given to God in the behaviors that we do, but also in the attitudes that we have, and the way that we process things, and the way that we think about things. Everything about us to some degree is broken or flawed in a variety of ways.

We don't even match our own standards, let alone the standard that others might impress on us. And so a lot of times we break our own rules, and we do things that we don't wanna do, and so he died on the cross to bear our sins away, and at the cross he received the punishment.

That we deserved.

And we are told that anyone who trusts in him will be born again to a new life. And not a new life alone. It's very important because I think in the church, and down through the ages, we can catch a wrong thought.

A thought that to be brought into the faith is an isolated solo thing, and we might ask about your personal testimony of salvation, and that's fundamentally true. Nobody is brought in because they're a part of a church.

You don't get to be saved and get to heaven because you attend a church. But the reality is when you are saved, you are not saved to an isolated journey alone. Praise God, anybody glad for that? But you are brought into a family, into a community that is here to support, and to love, and to encourage, and to challenge, and to even bring rebuke when we go astray.

Part of the reason that I wanna be a member of a local church is because I know my own frailty. I know my own propensity to wander away, and I need others in my life to call me back when I begin to wander, and when I begin to go astray from God's will for me.

That's part of it.

Part of it is to have somebody to celebrate with when things are going well, too, right? Like we do celebration, and as a church, we should do celebration well, and we should do sorrow well, and we should do everything in between while in community together.

We are not saved alone to a life of solitary, slugging it out. And if you're here this morning, and you feel alone, then let me just encourage you to take advantage of some of the things as we are gonna go through this sermon and talk about community, to take advantage of some of the things that are there for relationships.

And maybe you're here, and you're introverted, and you have a hard time with even identifying that you need those relationships, and you do, fundamentally, and maybe just the encouragement that during the connection time here in a few minutes, you would actually get up and not introduce yourself to everybody in the room because that's not gonna be your style, but maybe pick one person and go chat with them, go talk with them, go engage in the foundation, and the starting point of a relationship is introduction, right, that's the starting place for something that could eventually turn into a better relationship where you can.

I would discourage you from starting off with rebuke, right, like when you don't know somebody, like that would be a bad starting point, but eventually, how many of you know that it would take you a little while to get to the point where you would call something out that you see in somebody's life?

You'd have to have a little bit more of a fundamental foundational relationship with somebody like that, anybody in agreement with me on that?

So yeah, you need that.

But a major part of new life in Christ is growing deeper into relationships within the community of Christ followers. And this morning, I've entitled this sermon straight up, Growing in Community, because that's what I believe Paul had in mind when he wrote this section of scripture to us.

Paul is going to address the responsibility of the church to live well together, to live in health in relationships to one another. And this is much easier said than done. If you identified that in your relationships with people that might, I mean, just thinking in terms of those of you in the room that are married, those of you that have friends, those of you that are maybe still living with parents at home, or those of you that have children, how many of you know relationships might be some of the hardest things that you deal with on a day in and day out basis, you know?

I mean, you know, difficulties in relationships are much more difficult to overcome than, say, your car won't start, right? I mean, your car, that's inconvenient, right, when your car won't start, but I mean, you know, there's a fairly reasonable solution to that.

There are guys called mechanics who can fix that, or those of you that are more handy might be able to solve that yourself, but relationships can be an ongoing hardship in our lives. But as we dig into this text, I believe that God has for each one of us in this text conviction, encouragement, and correction.

He has those three things available for us every time we open his word. There is at least one of those that's gonna come to bear in our lives, either encouragement, hey, here's something that God is saying, and I think it's going pretty well, and I'd encourage you to check that with others in your lives.

If you think you're handling, if you think you're nailing something, it might be good to check with somebody who knows you and confirm that you're nailing it, right? Because sometimes, anybody ever overconfident about something like that?

So yeah, sometimes it's like I need others to let me know that that's going well. Some of us, it's gonna hit us as encouragement, but some of us are gonna be rebuked or corrected by this. You're not engaging in relationships as God would desire.

You're not loving others as he wants. And so we all need that for our role in the community of God here at Recast. So let's open our Bibles to 1 Thessalonians 5, 12 through 15 if you're not already there, or just go ahead and navigate in your device over there,.

Your app or whatever.

And Mike has some Bibles here, and they are already open to this passage. And if you don't have a Bible in front of you, he would love to bring you a copy of God's word. Just slip your hand up, and he'll bring you a copy of God's word.

But we want everybody to have a Bible that they can follow along and see the things that I'm reading are coming from God's word to us. They're not me making this stuff up as I go. That would be really bad.

So 1 Thessalonians 5, 12 through 15. And again, Recast, as I often say, this is God's word. God is going to speak as I read this, not my voice, but his voice speaking to us through the text of his word.

Again, 1 Thessalonians 5, 12 through 15. We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work.

Be at peace among yourselves. And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the faint-hearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. See that no one repays anyone, evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone.

Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for the word of God that has the power to convict and to, in a sense, forge community and to actually be the foundations of what this church is built on. Father, we're gathered together to hear from your word.

We're gathered together to hear from you and to know how we ought to live and what you have done for us and who we actually are and who you are. And Father, I pray that those things would be revealed to us through your word and through the conviction of your spirit this morning.

Father, I rejoice in the opportunity we have right now to sing some songs to you, and I pray that it would turn into so much more than just an exercise of our vocal chords, of singing together, but it would be a rejoicing and a recognizing how awesome and glorious and worthy and majestic you truly are, and to come before you in humility and deep thanks for the cross and the sacrifice that's been given for us.

Father, I pray that you would be glorified in this time of singing together, that we will do now what we can't do alone, and that is to praise you together in community. And I thank you for this opportunity in Jesus' name, amen.

Well, thanks a lot to Dave and the band for leading us. I'm grateful for them. And be sure at some point to express your thanks and your gratitude for,.

That's gonna be right in my eye.

For about five minutes there. Might just, Dan, if you'd just shut that door on that side. Somebody's windshield is, it's got the sun right there. Perfect. That was Dave. So thanks, canceled. Sorry, just kidding, just kidding.

Oh, you guys were listening to that, sorry. Remember that if you need any more coffee, juice, or donuts, you can take advantage of that and get as comfortable as possible. I recognize it's really hot in here and you might need to get up and stand by the door or whatever, and hopefully not everybody's huddled around the door, because then that would get creepy and also very hot.

But whatever it takes to keep your focus on God's word over the next half an hour or so is the point. And part of that is keeping your Bibles open to 1 Thessalonians 5, 12 through 15. I recognize that in the shuffle, you may have lost your place.

So I say that every time we come back together, 1 Thessalonians 5, 12 through 15, so you can see that the things that I'm saying are coming from the text of scripture there. And that really is our focus.

Even this short text that we're looking at this morning outlines into three pretty simple points that all pertain to the community life of the church. So I've got three points here. Again, I don't do a whole lot of three-point sermons, but it seems like the text of the letters have a lot more propositional point-by-point truth in them, and they lend themselves to this kind of outlining.

And so when you're preaching through or when you're learning through the narrative portions of scripture, it's not as easy to outline. But these come at us in the way that I'm trying to take and understand Paul's line of thinking and then bring that into us and to our modern times.

And so that's what's going on when I see these three points. Remember that Paul is writing this to a specific young church in a Greek town called Thessalonica. That's where that funny name Thessalonians comes from, is from the name of that city.

It's still a current modern-day Greek town. Today it's pronounced differently. It's Thessaloniki, ends with an I now, but I don't know why the Greek language shifted that, but Thessalonica is what it was called in ancient times.

But he's writing to us to give us a better glimpse of the inner workings of a church. And we are here this morning, hopefully, to receive instructions on how we should act as a community based on this teaching.

And so that's gonna be fundamental. So the first point is that Paul addresses community and leadership. Community and leadership is point number one, and that's in verses 12 through 13. If you're taking notes, you'll see these two verses tying in that concept of how does the community and leadership relate to one another.

The way that leaders respond to the church and the way that the church responds to leaders is of necessity an important aspect to the community life of a church. And I think some of you have experienced the ins and outs of leadership going bad or the congregation going bad or whatever, and vice versa, and relationships getting sundered between leadership and the church.

And so you can understand why Paul, hopefully you can understand why Paul would be addressing that. The second point is gonna be that Paul will address the community life of the church toward each other.

What is the internal relationship from congregation to congregation, from person to person within the congregation, how does that work? The way that the church functions as a community toward one another is fundamental to the health of a church.

The way that relationships are forged and the way that we care for one another, and we'll see exactly what those specific instructions are. And then the third, lastly, Paul addresses how the community is to respond to those primarily outside, really he says to everyone, but particularly with a focus on those who are doing evil and would even be seeking to destroy the church.

Well, what is our relationship like to people who would persecute us, and particularly, obviously in Thessalonica where they were undergoing significant persecution in their context that mattered all the more.

For us, I still think it matters in the sense that our persecution might look different, but knowing the way that things can go, culture to culture and the way that things slide, we may actually eventually be looking at a need to apply this in a very literal way in the way that we as a church would respond to persecution.

But let's jump, let's launch out into verses 12 through 13 on community and leadership. I wanna point out it's funny, it's a funny text to preach as a pastor, okay? And I don't do very well as a person, and my wife could attest to this, as a person who doesn't address the elephant in the room.

I'm usually kind of a tackle it head-on kind of person. I don't like to tiptoe through the tulips, and so to tackle this head-on, Paul begins by asking the Thessalonians to respect those who are defined by three categories.

They are called to respect those who labor among the congregation. They are called to respect and esteem those who are over the congregation in the Lord, and they are called to esteem and respect those who admonish you.

And really, it's three things that define one class of people, and it's very clear in verses 12 through 13 that Paul is referring to the way that the leadership should respond toward its leadership. And the thing that makes this an elephant in the room is the reality that I, as a leader in this church, am preaching this morning to all of you to respect me.

Anybody a little uncomfortable with that? Okay, that's what the text is doing here, and it's like, oh, that's the elephant in the room, so let's get that out on the table and talk about that. You may be happy to know that this is not a comfortable position for me to be in.

I can imagine, though, and I wanna be clear and transparent with you, I can imagine within the sinfulness of my own heart the ability for me to stand up here and preach this with my own force, with my own feelings of self-importance or even an air of entitlement in this text.

But as we dissect this first point about the way that leaders and the church work together in community, I hope that you can clearly see what I observed this week as I studied this and poured over it and thought about my role in this and the congregation's role.

This is an extremely important teaching for the life and health of a local church. It is foundational and fundamental, as awkward as it may be, and as much as I think pastors might push this aside and go, this text, somebody else can talk about that, we'll have a guest speaker come in and talk about that, or we'll just skip it altogether.

If we were going through a sermon series on my top 10 passages, this isn't gonna show up. If we just preached what really spoke to my heart, this isn't one that I'm gonna be like, hey, let's go to this sermon series on respecting your pastor.

How many of you think that might be kind of awkward and kind of a red flag anyways? If a pastor's doing a sermon series on respect myself, that's kind of rough, and that might be a sign that you're in the wrong place, if your pastor's doing that.

Not a one-off sermon like this, where he's going through First Thessalonians, though. That would be a sign that you're in the right church, of course, but no, obviously, it's a little bit awkward, and it's kind of like the elephant in the room, and it is something that's worth identifying.

But I hope that you see that as we walk through this first point that it is fundamental. It is extremely important, and maybe some of you have lived it. Maybe some of you have seen that breakdown to such a degree in such a way that you recognize how ugly it is when leadership and the congregation are not working well together.

And that can be the very source of some of the most divisive things that many of us could face in our lives. Some of you are in this room, and I know you can point to that being a significant low point in your life when you went through a church split, you went through an issue where you didn't really know if the pastor should stay or go, and it didn't end well and things like that, and so it's fundamental.

But I wanna first consider the definition of the role of leader in the church that's given here, and that's the conviction to me. That's my part in this. That's where God is speaking to me and correcting me and making sure that I'm thinking about these things right.

First, the definition of leadership in the church is those who labor among you, those who are working hard to serve the congregation. There's labor. That word is, there's all different kinds of Greek words that can be used for work, and this is the hard one.

This is toil, this is effort expended, this is going to bed exhausted and tired is the image that you have here. Now, Paul isn't just merely identifying, by the way, a paid pastor. He's not saying there's one leader in your church, there's one who is serving you, and you're supposed to esteem him.

He's not even strictly only identifying elders here, although he's gonna eventually talk about them admonishing you, they're the ones who are teaching and are guiding and directing, and they are serving over you in the Lord, and so there's some of that that's going on there, but there are many who labor within the church, right?

You know that? There's many who serve to allow us to have chairs to sit in and to worship God here and to lead in worship and to practice and all of the stuff that goes into that. There are those who arrive early here at Recast and stay late and have done so for years.

There are those who have moved literally tons. I'm sure if you measured the weight of these chairs and then considered how many times they've been picked up and sat down and picked up and sat down, there's been literally tons of heavy lifting that has been done in this church in the three years that we have been here.

But further, I would suggest to you that there's something that's always behind the scenes, and I think we know it in our hearts. There's an emotional labor that comes in preparing lessons, preparing sermons, grieving with those who are mourning, bringing rebuke to those who are practicing evil, and even just generally making high-level decisions that are stressful that affect the future of this church and the direction that we're going and the entire body of believers.

I personally can testify, and I think probably many in this room can relate to this illustration, but I have worked many different jobs since I was 12 years old. I started detasseling corn when I was 12 in the summers, and then I have had some level or some type of employment pretty consistently since then.

And some of those jobs have been more physically demanding than others. How many of you have worked a job that was pretty physically demanding? I know a lot of us in this room, at least some point in our history, maybe you're currently doing that.

And I would identify that all of our work, all of our work is cursed with some level of toil, right? Regardless of whether you push a pen in crunch numbers, whether you're designing stuff with CAD,.

Whether you're working at a computer,.

Whether you're in sales, whatever, there's some level of brokenness that you have to overcome every single day in your job. Anybody testify to that?

Are you a stay-at-home mom?

A lot of things that you have to overcome in that. I had four hands raised, you guys. Are you seriously that sleepy this morning? I mean, how many of you have recognized that there's a part of your job that is toil?

Okay, 17 of you now. Okay, excellent. Some of you are like, I'm not playing that game, Don.

I'm way past that.

I don't raise my hand anymore. I'm not doing that, so whatever. All right. But yeah, it's toil. There's work that's involved in all kinds, and in those, I've wrapped up some days with physical tiredness.

Some of you can identify with that. You wrap up a day, and you're just ready to put your head on your pillow, and you're physically tired. Like the next day, you're sore, and you get up, and you have to do it again anyways, and there's a physicalness to that.

I worked for Gordon's Food Service. When Lynn and I were first married, we knew that I was gonna be a temporary job, so I kind of picked up a position that was kind of short-lived, and I knew I wasn't gonna be there long, and I unloaded semis by hand at Gordon's Food Service, 50-pound bags of onions all day long.

Do you know what you smell like when you're unloading 50-pound bags of onions, and repalletizing them in different orders so that they could fit in the Gordon's Food Service system up there off of 44th Street?

So it was hard work,.

And it was just constant, unending labor. When the one truck got unloaded, guess what pulled in? Another truck, all day long, eight hours. So it was hard work, but I've also wrapped up some nights with emotional tiredness, and if you relate to that, do you know what I'm talking about?

There's an emotional level of tiredness, and I think that sometimes, people in various jobs can kind of get at each other. That's not work. That's not work.

I mean, come on.

It's not like delivering packages, or it's not like teaching kids, or whatever, name whatever you do, and you can probably think of somebody who doesn't work as hard as you, right? That can't be work, but I'm not sure that I can identify which night I was more tired, with the emotional exhaustion of doing a funeral, or with the physical exhaustion of unloading a semi.

I can't really tell you which one of those is worse. I can just tell you it's crash into bed at the end of those two scenarios, and that's just us, and so there's different types of labor, and I wanna be clear about that.

I wanna make sure that we all understand that, and we respect each other, and the different roles that God has given us to play, and recognize that there's different kinds of work, and it all has a semblance of toil to it, and ministry ought to be labor for those who are called out to serve the local church.

It should be labor.

They should work hard at it.

The second modifier in this text to define the leadership is that they are over you in the Lord. Very important and fundamental to all of the study that I did on this this week is that this is not an issue of importance.

It is not that the leadership is over you as in hierarchy, as in more important than the congregation. There is nobody in this church that is more important than the other. We are all created in the image of God, loved, he died for us, but they've been placed in a position of watchful care over you.

There is a board of elders here who is put in a position of watchful care over this flock. It is to be serviced like a shepherd, not like a tyrant, and notice that leadership is over the flock, and this is fundamental to your understanding.

If you don't get anything else about this point, get this. It is over the flock in the Lord. One of the most terrifying and disgusting things is when a pastor claiming to be serving the flock, claiming to serve the flock in the Lord, abuses the sheep for his own ego, when he's really serving the flock in himself, when a shepherd uses the sheep so that he can feel powerful, or so that he can make a name for himself, or so that he can obtain financial gain.

That's a terrifying and an ugly thing. When I, as a church leader, by the way, hear the phrase, over you, in the Lord, I don't rejoice in the over you. I tremble at the in the Lord. I tremble at the in the Lord.

I am indeed called here to lead. I believe that that calling is important. I also believe that God has equipped me for this task. I've seen it over and over again, and to his glory and to his honor alone, that he has called me to this place for this time.

But I take seriously that my position in this church is first and foremost a calling in the Lord. He is my boss, he is my chief, he is my shepherd, and the one to whom I will give an account for the way that I have led a flock that is just merely his on loan.

I am just merely a steward of the authority and calling that he has placed here. Recast is God's church. It belongs to Jesus Christ. And anything that I'm ever over is only in the Lord. The last modifier for these leaders is that they are the ones who admonish you.

Talking about the leaders who admonish you, that's what I'm up here doing right now, I'm admonishing you. My goal every Sunday morning is that I will seek to impart to you the truth of God's word by first letting it impact my heart, by first asking God's spirit from Monday through Saturday, convict me, break me over your text, let this, I don't ever wanna get up here and preach something to you that hasn't first hit me.

I plead and I pray and I ask God, please let this get in here and into here before it ever comes out here. I think that's very, very important too, the idea and the concept of admonishing. The leadership that Paul has in mind here, think about it, are those who serve the flock laboring, those who in the Lord exercise authority and at the same time they are teachers who bring the truth with authority.

And so within a healthy church, community leaders will exhibit that hard work, they will labor, they will only exercise authority in the Lord, which I think involves at the bare minimum the reminder that they are accountable to him for their leadership.

And then further, they will admonish the church with truth from God's word. Admonishing is a strong word, in English even, but in the Greek it is there too, it's a strong, strong teaching that goes beyond just asking the questions.

I'm not up here to ask the questions, I'm up here to explain God's word and to hope to provide you with some answers. But there's a lot of preaching today that just amounts to just kinda asking the questions, get your thoughts kinda stirred up and get you thinking about this or that or whatever, but acting like there's no answers.

And I'd caution you against that. Not that I'm the only preacher you can listen to, not that it's just my teaching or even just my style, there's all kinds of styles of preaching and types of preaching, but go where someone is explaining God's word.

If God moves you on from here, if this isn't the right fit for you, I've even helped people, I don't know if you guys realize this, but I've said this to people, very few will take me up on it because they think it's awkward, but it's more awkward for them than it is for me, but if Recast isn't the place for you, if you're attending here and you've only been here a few weeks.

And you're like, I don't know,.

We're checking other things out, we're trying to figure out, I've helped other people find a church that's a good fit for them. You let me know what you're looking for, I know a lot of other pastors, I know a lot of the other churches in this community that, I mean, we want you here and we wanna connect in community with each other and we want this to continue to grow in Christ, grow deeper, to grow wider in our influence, that is for the gospel of Christ, but there's a reality that if this isn't the right fit, I would help you to go find a church where they're still teaching with authority the truth of God's word, because I'm telling you what, you could stumble on a lot of churches that aren't.

You can easily stumble along a lot of churches that are kind of just preaching good thoughts and kind of a little bit of pop psychology in there and different things. Again, that's a little far afield.

That wasn't in my notes and if anybody's offended by anything I just said, I realize that I can, I like the way that we do things at Recast. We started this church with a group of people and I don't think this is the only thing that God has going.

I wanna make sure that that's abundantly clear, but man, do I think that teaching from the authority of God's word is the only reason I can stand up here and be admonishing you right now. That's the only thing I have to admonish.

Admonishment is more than just life coach type suggesting. Admonishing is a full body robust teaching that brings with it true authority, not authority from the speaker. This isn't my authority. How could I ever stand up here and tell you to respect and esteem me and the elders here at this church?

How could I ever in my own strength admonish you to do that? I think that would be a terrible thing to do. But I'm not standing up here on my own authority. I'm standing up here teaching the word of God.

And by the way, not even standing up here on authority that you've loaned me. I recognize that there's some degree of that. By showing up, you've shown me some respect and you've shown me some esteem and there's some sense, unless you're just here for the worship and you really love Dave and you're like, I would put up with Don for a little bit if we could just get that worship, get that going.

I don't know. Or maybe it's just a relationship is the only, maybe you're just hanging on by a thread and it's like, well, I've got a friend over here, so I'll keep going to church.

I don't know.

But that was supposed to be funny and apparently it wasn't because a lot of you are there.

A lot of you are there.

That's a little too close to home, Don. Just barely hanging on by a thread, I don't know. Maybe this temperature is why you're barely hanging on by a thread. I don't know. But I'm not standing up here on my authority.

I am standing up here with a focus on communicating the very word of God. That's my hope and my point. And he's telling us in this first point this morning in verses 12 to 13, that our church will be more healthy.

It will be a more healthy community if I am the right kind of leader and if you respect and esteem the work that is done among you. And I think it's very important to note that in verse 13, we are called to esteem leaders, it says right in the text, because of their work.

It is not a blanket respect for the position. It is not saying that just because somebody holds the title of elder, just because someone holds the title of pastor, that you must respect everything that they do.

Respect them because of their work. But if a leader is laboring among you, if they are exercising authority only in the Lord, and if they are admonishing you from the word, then respect and esteem them.

I mentioned if I was just picking my favorite passages, you would never hear a sermon about this, but I think that God wants us to hear a sermon about this. Honestly, take a moment and consider why this is here.

Is it to make pastors uncomfortable? Is that why it's here? I believe it's here because it's Community Church Health 101. I think it's fundamental to the health of a church. How many of you in the room might testify that you have watched a leader slide into abusing their power?